Journeys in a
declining
industry
61
Journeys in a declining
industry: stories of footwear
manufacturing
Toby Harfield and R.T. Hamilton
Department of Management, University of Canterbury, Christchurch,
New Zealand
Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to allow new insights to be developed by applying
an alternative approach to strategic change which, in this case, takes the form
of company decline. Most research in strategic management has adopted the
approach of the detached outsider prepared to impose interpretations and
prescriptions. We concur with Bettis (1991) that strategic management research
has become bound up in a straightjacket of “dated” organizational concepts and
“multivarient statistical methodology” (Bettis, 1991, p. 317). More recently,
serious concerns have been expressed about the value and relevance of strategic
management research to managers (Hamel and Prahalad, 1996; Spender 1993).
In an attempt to move forward, we propose an alternative approach which
accommodates managers’ accounts of their experiences in the belief that
managers’ perceptions are valuable to other managers. This study also applies
an experimental structure in which the stories of individuals rather than
academic discourses are highlighted, both visually and structurally (Denzin
and Lincoln, 1994).
The content focuses on elaborating the “insider view” as suggested by
Evered and Louis (1981) and is grounded in qualitative research which “seems
to be moving further … away from grand narratives … to study the world
always from the perspective of the interacting individual” (Denzin and Lincoln,
1994, p. 575). This insider view is constructed from individual stories using
Boje’s (1991) definition of a story as “an exchange between two or more persons
during which a past or anticipated experience was being referenced, recounted,
interpreted or challenged” (Boje, 1991, p. 8). These stories are representations
(Jeffcutt, 1993; Watson, 1994) rather than verbatim accounts because of the
necessity for anonymity within an industry which now comprises fewer than 30
small factories.
We present the experiences of owners/CEOs of footwear manufacturing
firms based in New Zealand as stories of managing decline through a decade of
increasing international competition due to the progressive liberalization of the
economy (Kelsey, 1995; Le Heron and Pawson, 1996). Local footwear
manufacturers in New Zealand had 80 per cent of the market in 1985, but are
Journal of Organizational Change
Management, Vol. 10 No. 1, 1997,
pp. 61-70. © MCB University Press,
0953-4814